Fascism is alive and well at the state level, too

For academics, there is much to be heartened by at the moment in the battle against the Trump administration.

• Harvard has signaled it is going to fight the Trump administration’s efforts to extort control over its internal processes by withholding federal research grant funding. Princeton has indicated that it stands with Harvard.

• Rutgers faculty have resolved to fight the Trump administration and are urging a Big 10 wide union of universities to join the battle.

• MIT and other schools (including Cornell and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) with substantial Department of Energy funding are banding to file suit to prevent the mandatory cut of indirect costs to 15%, which follows the similar move at NIH.

• Numerous individual foreign students across the country are filing suit to oppose the withdrawal of their F1 or J1 visas.

However, while for the moment the Trump administration is focused on national efforts to attack universities, we should keep in mind that Republican partners in statehouses are also seeking to impose authoritarian controls on universities, most prominently with the signing of SB1 into law in Ohio by Gov. Mike DeWine. This bill is sure to face a variety of legal challenges, but it almost certainly will serve as a template for red states to control their institutions of higher education and shape the state towards permanent majority party status for Republicans.

SB1 is a long bill (full text here). Tom Hodson has broken down some key aspects, which I summarize below.

1. The bill eliminates training, policy, or offices encouraging Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Hence, offices for minority students, LGBTQ+ students, students with disabilities, and veterans will apparently all be on the chopping block. Scholarships associated with DEI, and hiring efforts aimed at increasing DEI will clearly be eliminated.

2. There is a big emphasis on promoting “intellectual diversity.” This is obvious code for making sure you include preferred conservative perspectives in the classroom and speakers. To ensure this, course outlines, course proposals, and invited speakers must be shown to represent diverse viewpoints.

3. There is an emphasis on identifying “controversial subjects” and no one can make a student feel intimidated for their “intellectual diversity.” A student can file a complaint against a professor that infringes on their intellectual diversity and every university must have a system in place to address these topics. While it does not appear that the university can prohibit talking about “controversial subjects,” one can imagine the chilling effect from students complaining if, e.g., a professor talks about climate change and disavows a crackpot opinion from a conservative student. Universities must take no positions on controversial topics. What are identified “controversial topics” in the bill?  “any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”

4. The syllabus for each course must be posted for the entire public to view, and include all assignments, readings, professional credentials of the instructor.

5. All students must take a mandatory 3 credit civic literacy course. The course must include: a study of the American economic system and capitalism; the whole constitution; the Declaration of Independence; at least 5 of the Federalist paper essays; the Emancipation Proclamation; the Gettysburg Address; MLK Jr’s letter from the Birmingham Jail; writings of Adam Smith including studying “The Wealth of Nations.”

6. Faculty strikes are illegal. Not all state institutions in Ohio have faculty unions. For example, Ohio State University is not unionized, but Youngstown State, Kent State, Bowling Green State, and, just this month, Ohio Universities are all unionized.

7. Boards of Trustees will be restricted to shorter terms.

8. Faculty must be subject to post-tenure review through institution developed policies approved by the state Chancellor of Higher Education. Faculty must meet performance expectations; failing to do so could be cause for censure, remedial training, or termination.

I will say that having a common civics course is not a bad idea if it is taught fairly, and many of us with academic careers became aware of “deadwood” faculty who had tenure but contributed little to the department in their later years. Post tenure review at Ohio universities already occurs at the Full Professor stage. The University of California has an extensive post tenure merit review process. However, the effort to suppress DEI in SB1 tilts the playing field back to white men, the preventing of strikes is flat out union busting, and the restriction of intellectual discussions in the classroom and via public syllabi is highly concerning. One suspects that the post merit review above will be leaned on for those who fail to conform with ideological purity. The post tenure merit review process at University of California is incentive based; if you don’t hit the marks you stall out in salary apart from cost of living adjustments. In Ohio, given that all command decisions are basically handed back to the state government and the Chancellor of Higher Education, a governor level appointment, you can bet that as long as Ohio stays in Red hands, the pressure will be to conform to Republican ideology.

This micromanagement of the universities enabled by this is personal to me. I was a professor at Ohio State for 10 years, 1986-1996. During that time, I saw Ohio as a blue or at worst, purple state. When I arrived, Rhodes Scholar and Democrat Dick Celeste was governor, and Howard Metzenbaum and John Glenn were senators. I saw Ohio help elect Bill Clinton president twice. Most of the time, I taught basic physics classes, advanced mechanics classes for undergraduates, and statistical mechanics and solid state physics classes for graduate students. The physical laws in those classes are certainly unlikely to fall in the list of controversial subjects delineated above.

But in my last year in Columbus, I taught a course on energy and the environment, where I discussed climate change and the depletion of fossil fuels. That was at a time when Ben Santer was publicly reamed by former National Academy of Sciences President Frederic Seitz in the Wall Street Journal for making the decidedly uncontroversial statement in the IPCC Report of 1995 that “"Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate.” Since that time, there is no doubt that human influence is causing climate change. This is not a controversial subject in the scientific community. It is only controversial to those who wish to continue to promote a fossil fuel based economy.

I taught the same class at Davis nearly continuously for 25 years. There is no question that this class would have a big target pointed on it by the standards of SB1. I encouraged the class to take perspective on the views presented; for example, I had a debate between a local anti-nuclear activist and a nuclear engineer about the viability of nuclear power. The students almost unanimously favored the engineer’s perspective. After making the class for climate change and human agency, I polled the class. It was fairly equally split between accepting the emerging scientific consensus and disbelieving it. But I don’t doubt that in a climate where Fox News can amplify the voice of single transphobic fencer exponentially, that one mad conservative in that class would spell big trouble for the teacher.

What will be the impact of SB1? Well, it is not a done deal. There will be lawsuits over academic freedom, worker’s rights, first amendment rights. There may be lawsuits over discrimination, but in an era where the Supreme Court has ruled that the need for affirmative action is gone, there will be likely little traction.

I expect the direct impact to be on a brain drain away from Ohio. Bright young starting faculty candidates will choose other positions. Senior faculty stars will look for jobs elsewhere. The brightest young students may choose private universities or just leave Ohio to go to college.  

Ohio is the most prominent state to adopt such measures so far. I doubt it will be the last. Stay tuned.